Exotic Spaces in German Modernism (review)

This is both an exciting and a disappointing book. On the one hand it provides a welcome corrective to what the author describes as the frequently overzealous tendency in postcolonial criticism to regard all nineteenth- and twentieth-century European writers as being indiscriminately and by definition Eurocentric and colonialist in their attitudes towards foreign spaces and cultures. On the other hand, the quality of writing is uneven and the copyediting, if any has taken place at all, was irresponsibly careless. More about this later; first, to the positive qualities of this volume.

In her study of German modernists' relationships with the exotic, Gosetti-Ferencei laudably sets out to revise the simplistic assumption that these writers, by mere dint of their European stock, necessarily "fall prey to cultural stereotyping" (255). This happens, she concedes, but asks that we resist "the unilateral indictment of any evocation of the 'exotic' by European writers . . . in favour of a more differentiated and nuanced approach" (254). She argues that painting European writing in broad brush strokes as uniformly hegemonic, colonialist, imperialist, or racialist not only essentializes "the 'Occidental' or Western subjectivity of the writer" (13)—much as they themselves are said to essentialize the Orient—but also does injustice to the plurality of voices and diversity of intentions behind modernist writing. "Even the problematic representations of the 'Oriental,'" she insists, "may contain ambiguities, ironies, contradictions, and other elements that destabilize a dominant interpretive code" (14). She identifies five such destabilizing modes in German modernist writing. "Re-enchantment through epiphany" in travel writings by Hofmannsthal, Dauthendey, and Hesse features as the subject of the first chapter. The second explores the "the collapse of self" in Mann's Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain and Zweig's Amok. The third chapter looks at Kafka's "symbolic appropriation of territory", with its resulting "liberation of the imagination," in his non-empirical depictions of the vast spaces of China, Russia, and the United States (124). The fourth chapter is given over to the "aesthetic transformation" effected in Benn's, Musil's, and Kubin's explorations of the exotic as symbolic "topographies" of the primal subconscious. And the fifth chapter concludes the volume with a critical rereading of Brecht's relocation of the jungle into the modernist city in In the Jungle of the Cities; here the submission of the city's inhabitants, and the play's protagonists, "to irrational drives serves to depict the modern Western self as the truly primitive, as precarious and unstable" (249).

In her close readings of these primary materials Gosetti-Ferencei shows convincingly not just that the "mysteriousness" attached to the exotic "allows dominated geographies and cultures to serve as symbolic receptors for projections of otherness" (5) within "an imperialist or racialist geopolitics" (6), as the traditional postcolonial take would have it, but also that "exotic spaces in some essential modernist texts [are also] sites of . . . contest and recoding of the relationship between the familiar and the exotic, the self and the foreign other" (1). This very mysteriousness may also serve, she contends, "symbolically to protect the differences of foreign places (and peoples) from being absorbed into a dominant aesthetic or world-view. [Thus] mysteriousness may be invoked implicitly in justifications for exploitation, but it can also serve to suspend or limit epistemological and even moral arrogance" (6). It is precisely the various mechanisms of suspension of epistemological and moral arrogance that Gosetti-Ferencei capably explores in her novel readings of these modernist texts. She comes into her own—as a professor of literature and philosophy—especially in those passages and sections where she combines her analysis with reflections on their philosophical contexts, for instance Kant in the third chapter, and Nietzsche and Schopenhauer in the fourth.

Readers of the volume will come to it from varying backgrounds and with different expectations, and will accordingly engage differently with the individual chapters. For my part I am still not fully convinced that the inclusion of European or even American exotic spaces—such as...